The Lumia 1020 is on the path to become a legend among mobiles (and by the looks of it, a milestone in mobile imaging too). The official unveiling date is set for July the 11th, but the spec leaks have been on a steady roll since early April. . . . read more

3 years ago I downloaded Rovio's 'Angry Birds' game for some fun my daughter to play with, and never ever would i imagine then, that the ability to play this game would count as a good point on a camera reviewed at DPreview. Good or bad, progress it certainly is. But there are valid points, even for hardcore avid photographers, to have an open operating system like Android on a camera:

"Despite being a first generation product the Samsung Galaxy Camera works surprisingly well. The camera interface could be a little sleaker and more responsive and the image quality is average at best but the huge number of available apps, the smoothness of Android 4.1, the excellent screen and the flexible zoom range make up for these flaws. The Galaxy Camera is a great device for those who are planning to make good use of its connectivity . . . read more

This must be the very last device to be released with the Victorian era original Android version. Heck, even shacks in Asia putting together 49.99 toys have been putting at least Android 4 on their wares for the past year or so. I spent some quality hours with the S800c myself, and I honestly believe that the 'c' in the name stands for 'crap'. Jeff is a lot kinder than me however, he actually likes some aspects of the camera:

"Camera performance is good in most respects, with two notable exceptions. First, startup times. The camera takes 1.8 seconds to extend its lens and prepare for shooting. If the camera's been off for a while, then you'll have to wait for an additional 30 seconds for Android to boot up before the S800c is . . . read more

"Congratulations to all of the worthy winners, runners up and honorable mentions. You guys are all incredible and did a fantastic job! Thank you for making the Mobile Photo Awards the world’s biggest competition for mobile photography and art! The competition was a huge success this year with a record number of entries – the quality was extremely high and the jury worked long and hard to determine a slate of winners and runners up. We know that we will never please everyone – we realize that even judges disagree on an image so it’s obvious that entrants and viewers of this site will also take issue with certain choices. That said, every winning image and runner up along with the honorable mentions are chosen with careful thoughtfulness. We hope you. . . read more

Istockphoto recently announced they'd start accepting stock photos taken with a mobile device, and seeing the flood of crappy pics coming their way, they decided to educate their users a bit:

Mobile photography has made huge strides in a short time. We have this great powerful device in our hands or pockets now with all the extra tools and software needed to capture, edit and distribute our images in an extremely efficient and flexible manner. These devices output high enough quality images for commercial stock applications — provided the person looking through the viewfinder understands the fundamentals of what makes an image work. . . . read more

Offers Twice the Storage Capacity to Create & Enjoy Even More Incredible Content

CUPERTINO, California―January 29, 2013―Apple today announced a 128GB* version of the fourth generation iPad with Retina display. The 128GB iPad with Wi-Fi and iPad with Wi-Fi + Cellular models provide twice the storage capacity of the 64GB models to hold even more valuable content including photos, documents, projects, presentations, books, movies, TV shows, music and apps. . . . read more

maybe not so off topic, after all it is one of the most popular imaging taking devices.
Valerie Sarnataro at Brighthand reports:

"Despite its running title of "best smartphone in the market" for the past five years, Apple's iPhone seems to be losing traction among critics, as Consumer Reports has rated the company's iPhone 5 as the worst of the top smartphones.. . . read more

This is something you have to see in order to believe. Cycloramic rotates the iPhone 5 by using only it's vibration sensors. Simply put your phone upright on a level and slick surface like glass, laminate or marble, choose number of turns, press 'go' and pick up your jaw while the Iphone cirles around itself shooting a panoramic video. . . . read more

While the idea of refocusing a picture after it has been taken is mesmerizing, the first camera that does this, the Lytro light field camera is just a piece of crap. It is a slick but laggy, restrictive, and half-baked contraption whose ultra low-res camera and tiny lcd screen are throwbacks to an era when listening to Björk howling was concidered cool. Now Toshiba, changes all that with a sensor that comes with a usable resolution, can be had in usable devices like smartphones and tablets, and will work with video: . . . read more

"By compact camera standards, though, the Samsung Galaxy Camera's image quality isn't that great, suffering from obvious noise at relatively slow ISO speeds and chromatic aberrations, with the photos somewhat misleadingly looking much better on the excellent LCD screen than when downloaded onto a computer and viewed more closely. Still, its more than perfectly fine for cropping and resizing for posting on Facebook or Instagram, or for making regular-sized prints.

Although the Samsung Galaxy Camera is a large and eye-catching device, certainly more so than the ubiquitious . . . read more

Today we’re excited to announce the release of the largest upgrade to our Instagram iOS camera since it was revamped just over one year ago. The camera has been the core part of the Instagram experience since the day we launched and as a result, we’ve made significant improvements to its look and speed.. . . read more

After Instagram has withdrawn support for image previews within Twitter in the past several days, it is now the little blue bird's time to respond: A new service called Twitter Cards will make it possible for users to attach media to their tweets, media that can initially be enriched by a selection of photo filters. More functionality and features will be added along the road. Here's an (slightly morbid) example posted by the Twitter Dev team: . . . read more

"This is not a head-to-head battle with Instagram. Google's strategy here is to go after the photo geeks, the prosumers, the folks who resent how 90 percent of images now have the same retro filter. "It’s not like Instagram with one click filters," says Josh Haftel, a 12-year-veteran of Nik Software now working out of Google's Mountain View HQ as a product manager on Snapseed. "You’re not in and out in 5 seconds. You do more customization, from color saturation to light leaks." . . . read more

There are just a few caveats however, none of them pretty serious for the Iphanboy that wants it all: For starters, this is just for manual focusing, as there's no electrical coupling between the lenses and the iphone at all. But even then, you may have to tap your screen a couple of times to convince your iphone's camera that the image it sees is actually focused.

Then there's the real bummer for Canon lens owners: The mount is not compatible with the slightly smaller EF-S lenses, but only with the EF beasts. The reasoning here seems to be 'if you're gonna do it, do it all the way'.
Nikon users are luckier, the SLR mount is compatible with pretty much all Nikon Nikkor SLR lenses of the past several decades.

Images on the screen can (and will) appear darker than usual, that's because there's a 1-2 stop light loss due to the focusing scree, However, the same screen is pretty exposed to the elements, so a frequent cleaning might be in order, as to avoid dirt and dust showing up in your images.

For those of you really wanting this after reading all the above, PhotoJoJo throws in two loop holes on the mount so you can carry your Iphone with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens hanging from your neck, in style. . . . read more

"Yuval Koren, CEO of Eye-Fi, said the company came from a consumer perspective when designing the app, which has been in development for about a year.

“We didn’t want to build just another cloud service,” said Koren in an interview with AllThingsD. “We didn’t want the customer to have to think about the technology behind it, or worry about how much storage space they had left before . . . read more

"OK, so we wish it had a longer cable and smile recognition. But really, that's all we could come up with to complain about. Mainly it's just fun. Lots of fun. More fun than we've ever had with a shutter. Sure, our dSLR has interval timing but the setup requires an advanced degree in physics. We look at screen after screen of settings and have no idea how to set what. But with Triggertrap it was obvious.

And another thing. These electronic cameras just won't respond to a plain old mechanical cable release. So we often resort to. . . read more

Remember when Leica had the same issue with the M8 some years ago? The culprit was the missing IR filter, and Leica initially 'fixed' the issue by sending screw-on IR filters to its customers. Unfortunately, there's no such threaded mount on the Iphone 5 camera. . . . read more

Yes, we're all shocked by the extreme specs of this sensor, Mobot tries to make some sense out of it:

"Pixels, of course, we're familiar with. The pixel count is the first thing we want to know about any camera, and it's what we're playing around with when we crop, edit and resize images digitally. . . . read more

It's funny, each time someone predicts the end of the megapixel race​ total war, some company comes along and totally blows things (and false prophesies) up. All the imaging specs of this phone are truly mind boggling: A 1/1.2" sensor (larger than the Panasonic LX5, Canon S100 and Nikon P7100, and only slightly smaller than the one in Nikon's 1 series) 41 megapixels that max out at a 7728x5368 resolution, all aspherical Zeiss optics at f2.4, zero shutter lag, mechanical shutter with neutral density filter, and more, MUCH more. Links to Nokia white paper and hands-on after the press release. . . . read more

And by huge, we're not just thinking of the megapixel count, that currently stands at 16, thanks to monster phones such as the HTC Titan II. No, even though the quad core S4 can support up to a 20 Mpixel sensor, it also adds features such as 1080p 30fps video shooting, zero shutter lag, support for up to 3 cameras, image stabilization, and more. These features combined with the ever more extensive array of sensors, and common-day specs such as big touch screens, gps, and wifi, make for a very potential weapon directed to the whole range of point and shoot cameras: . . . read more

This is not your average add-on lens gizmo, crapgadget, visual expander or whatever you may call those things that stuck to your phone's lens and turn it into a real 'camera'. No, this device, transforms a regular mobile phone to a usable microscope. Some technical aspects: It attaches itself to the phone magnetically. The lens/sensor usable area of view becomes 2x3 millimeters. Surrounding leds allow illumination from different angles. The detail of the image produced ranges from 1/100 to 1/1000 of a millimeter, but accuracy suffers as the resolution increases. . . . read more

Built for the weekend adventurer, the Gerber Steady combines the utility of a multi-tool and the functionality of a camera tripod. It comes equipped with an adjustable cell phone and screw-in camera mount and two foldable legs that serve as a tripod. The rest of the tool is all Gerber ingenuity